# From 200k Users to a 7-Figure Exit: UGC Crash Course

Channel: BuildingNow Podcast
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgAhsPOWqWs
Duration: 29 min
Language: English
Words: 5968
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/GgAhsPOWqWs

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[0:00] But views do not matter for a brand. What matters is how many conversions are you getting out of those views. I think virality can't be invented. It can be engineered. [music] Hey everyone. So welcome to another episode of building now. Today I'm talking with an Naal. He grew up he grew a consumer app to 10K a month using short form UGC and now he helps other founders and builders learn distribution. So today we're really going to cover what UGC growth actually is and especially if you're starting from zero how you can leverage it for your business. So welcome on and um would love to hear a little intro from

[0:42] you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Really happy to be here Maya. I saw you did a pod with Bill and I was like hey we got to be here. I really really like the energy you had on the pod and what you were bringing together. I think it's really cool. Right. Um bit about myself originally from India then I moved to China quite early did a short 7 years stint in China. 7 to 8 years. Uh yes I speak Mandarin yes I can use chopstick and yes I uh love spending my time there. I would really love to go back. Actually I miss that place. Uh but when I was in China I was

[1:15] a professional bodybuilder. Along with that I also had a fitness business. We grew to we had 24/7 gyms and grew to about seven locations across China. Then decided to learn a bit more. I exited the business in the middle of COVID. Came to Europe, did my MBA long journey, worked with the B2B SAS in

[1:34] the middle, realized B2B wasn't for me. Went back into building. So moved to New York uh which is where I launched Flame. That was the breadandbut app for us. and uh we scaled it to over 200,000 users and learned a lot along the way as to what not to do while you're trying to scale an app. Um and I think that's what the learning of what to do comes out of after doing a lot of what not to do. You

[1:58] tend to figure out hey what to do. [snorts] Um but yeah so while I was in the US then uh what we did is we went really deep into organic content and couple of reasons right one is we realized that paid was just getting too saturated everyone who had a bit of money wanted to get into paid wanted to push out a lot of traffic drew the CPMs up through the roof and it was wild at the same front we saw Cali and a couple of other products succeeding with organic as well and we decided hey why not try to leverage off this train jumped on it and then I became known as

[2:31] the Tik Tok farmer on X. H haven't got a sickle but I've got a lot of experience managing um content on Tik Tok and we also starting up this year started doing UGC where more working like a media house where we are helping other founders scale to the same level we did and even beyond that. Um but yeah this kind of a nutshell about uh for my

[2:53] entire story. That's awesome. And um since this podcast is leaned towards like beginners and people who are just getting started out, I'd love for you to explain like you know what UGC growth is and how to kind of think about organic content. Yeah, incredible. Um and also just as a side note on that, UGC is perfect for beginners because the one of the reasons we didn't go deep into paid ads is we couldn't afford it. You need to have 10, 20, 30k in capital every month to be able to do it. Um, so let's touch base over what UGC it is. And I'm going to take a small step back here and dig into

[3:29] what influencer marketing is. Now we most people are going to be aware about that where you hire influencers who already have a massive audience to push out content for you. They usually do one video, two video and then you hope that their video goes viral or their followers come and start using your product. The two problems we see with this model which used to exist quite like you know from 2015 to 2025 it did really well but the two problems one anyone with over thou 10,000 followers is going to charge you an arm and a leg because as the market saturated then suddenly everyone wanted to be an

[4:04] influencer they became an influencer they had a bit of an audience and they suddenly they start telling you we have had cases where someone with you know 20,000 50,000 follower tells us yes I'll do one post or 10,000 or 20,000 and we like, hey, that's ridiculous. Like, that doesn't make sense to us. Second, what we also realized is we tried working with a few smaller influencers and we realized that a lot of influencers

[4:28] usually pump up their numbers, right? They'll be buying fake followers, they'll be loading on more impressions onto their videos and we did not get the results we wanted. So, too expensive plus not getting the results we wanted. We looked at UGC side of content. Now there's a whole debate that goes around UGC that it's it's called tech UGC, fresh UGC, canvas UGC. We just like calling it fresh UGC because we believe that you create a fresh account. So what happens in this instance is you hire creators in the US. Now creator is anyone who hasn't got a massive audience. We usually classify it as

[5:02] anyone who has under 10,000 followers. But they know how to be in front of the camera. They know how to clip a clip. they know how to somehow get traction when they're putting out content on socials. So, we locate these creators all across the US and then we ask them to create a fresh account on social media. The reason behind this and this is where my techie nerd comes out. I looked at the social algorithms quite a lot and Facebook and Instagram became big because of something called a social graph where you get content from the people you follow and the people who follow you are going to see primarily

[5:37] your content. Social graph worked really well. It's what led to Facebook's rise as well. But then Tik Tok came out and Tik Tok just going back into the history a bit was originally started by a company called Bite Dance. They were an AI company and they launched a news app called to where you with every swipe, every read of the paragraph you did, they could determine what kind of content would you like to see on the news feed. They use the same algorithm carried it over to video and they developed something called the interest graph where every time you're scrolling on Tik Tok, every time you watch a

[6:10] video, every millisecond you're watching a video, every time you pause on the video, they develop a graph of what your interest is. And why is it advantageous? because using that someone who's new to Tik Tok in 5 minutes of scrolling can have their feed tailored for them which means they can be addicted to their feed. Um and now now other channels are also carrying over the interest graph algorithm. So Instagram is doing it and the advantage with that is you could have an account with zero followers push out a piece of content. It goes out into the public which determines whether it's worth watching or not based on their

[6:46] interest. it pushes out to the next cohort and the next cohort. Someone with zero followers in their account, account created within a day can have a million views on the video they are putting out, which is kind of insane when you think about it because they don't have an audience. They don't have things built up, but they could just push out a piece of video that is really, really good and get this. So combining both these things where you can hire creators and you can get them for cheaper to push out content plus the interest draft switch of the algorithms on social. You can hire creators who create new accounts, push

[7:16] out content on these accounts and the content can go viral within a couple of days of posting it. And UGC is the strategy of hiring these creators, having them create new accounts and push out content on them to like to sell your brand or sell your product or sell your app. I had a coffee, Maya. So, I take the

[7:34] long way when I'm explaining something. This is I think this is super helpful because I think a lot of people watching this, they're just getting started out. So, like the more detailed and kind of like um clearer the explanation is, the better. So, I guess a couple questions going off of that, like um for someone getting started out, like should they look into creating content themselves or should they try to hire creators? Like what would be the first um like good

[7:58] first step? Um, in all honesty, what I would recommend is to create content themselves. Why? Because I believe content creation is like a muscle. And if you have someone else go and work out for you, you won't be able to train your own muscle, right? Like maybe they do really well. Maybe they could be your security guard after that, but they are not training the muscle you need to be developing early on. What I recommend to all founders is push out content for your product because that way you understand how to make a video get views but you also know how to make a video get conversions which are two very

[8:30] different things right you notice there are a lot of agencies out there which promise you x amount of views but views do not matter for a brand what matters is how many conversions are you getting out of those views and this is a muscle you can only build as a founder when you're out there when you're putting out content when you're noticing hey because of this content I have this conversions because of this I had this and you start developing this muscle regarding hey what could work better what kind of content should we target once you have that muscle logged in and what I recommend as a starting point is let's

[8:59] say you're getting your 100k videos and you can manage to log that in while getting conversions then I recommend pivoting to creators unless you can manage an iPhone farm on your own then I recommend pivoting to creators because of two things one is it allows you to push out more content at scale because every creator has three accounts they're pushing out content on and they're doing this on a daily basis which can be a lot to manage for an

[9:24] indie hacker or a solo developer. Second, creativity because if you create content every day yourself, you're only going to target it in one particular creative manner. If a creator does it, they'll have their own flavor, own twist, you know, own little dynamic behind it. So these are the two reasons I what I recommend is start out creating content yourself and then pivot into hiring creators or setting up a phone farm if you want to push out more

[9:47] content at scale. Got it. And um we'll touch on the phone farm a little bit later because I have a few questions on that but um that makes sense. So essentially you start creating content yourself and then when you see something that's working you kind of like that's when you pivot to like hiring creators and um because everyone

[10:05] has their own style of creating content. I wanted to touch on another thing you were talking about regarding like the conversion right um so I guess like a lot of people they give a lot of importance to views and you just mentioned it's not that important so what metrics should they be particularly looking at um when they're putting out content I think the best thing two-step process the first step what I recommend is understanding how to make your videos go viral which means you go you become obsessed with the graph graph or the chart you see where you can see the retention over time. You try to see

[10:40] what's happening at the 3se secondond mark. What's happening at the 5 to 10 second mark? Where are users falling off? How can you optimize on it? Once you do that, that's the first part of the picture. Step one. Step two would be then mapping the views you're getting. Once you understand how to get views, mapping them across your conversion

[10:56] chart. So, let's say I'm an app founder. I could have a chart of the downloads coming on the app store versus the views I'm getting. try to map them both together and see a spike in views leading to a spike in downloads. What kind of content drives that? What kind of content pulls that in? And once you start understanding that, you can really

[11:13] understand what do you go deep on. Right? If you, let's say, hypothetically, if you've got a slideshow format going out, if you've got a meme going out, if you've got a talking head going out, if you've got a reaction video going out, and you start mapping the views you're getting on these against what your install rate is looking like, you can understand which one of this format is leading to the

[11:31] most bang for your buck. Got it. So, it's like a lot of experimentation and really being very intentional about what you're putting out and studying everything essentially. Yeah. Because I I I have a genuine belief that a lot of people think virality is about being the most creative. I disagree. I think virality can't be invented. It can be engineered. Which means if you go from an engineering point of view, you look at

[11:57] the content, you run a lot of AB test. You can really understand how do you go viral time and time over again. You can't do that if you have one lucky shot. If you have one lucky shot, then the chances of virality are quite low as compared to you really engineering the hell out of it and understanding what

[12:12] drives it. Got it. And I wanted to also touch on a topic you mentioned in one of the earlier um discussion like you said like starting a fresh account, right? Like so I've been hearing a lot about like warming up your accounts especially when you're starting out like content. Um and I think you mentioned like you can start posting and start getting feedback. So like is there some kind of strategy that a you know founder who's trying to do like founderled marketing should like you know wait a certain days and train the algorithm into the niche that they're building in or um what are your

[12:43] thoughts on that? Very very good point. So what I used to do before to warm up my account was I would set up the account on my phone and then I would put it under my butt and it would become warm as it's a terrible joke. Uh why we want to warm up an account for think of it this way. When you're entering Tik Tok, Tik Tok doesn't know anything about you and it doesn't know what kind of content to deliver to you. But it also works the other way around, right? It also works in your content needs to be delivered to a certain audience and Tik Tok doesn't

[13:11] know who that audience is. Now, the reason or the importance behind a warm-up is because the in the moment you post a video, it goes out to a cohort of 300 users. Depending on their reaction, it goes out to the next 300 and the next 300. Now, if your account is completely cold, you might go out to the right cohort in the first go, or you might go out to a cohort which it doesn't apply at all. Let's say you're putting out content for Gen Z and this goes out to

[13:36] boomers and it's not going to be a hit. Not because the content has an issue, not because you know there's something going wrong with the way you're posting, but because the audience doesn't match the intent. Um, so what I recommend for that is uh doing it over a couple of days. You take your account and you try warming it up in the niche you are looking to target. Like we build an app for couples. So what we would do is we would go on Tik Tok and then we would start scrolling through on the day one and anytime we came across a couple content we would just stay on the

[14:04] content watch it completely like it save it. Awesome. Then what we would do the next day when we come is we would start integrating a deeper warm-up in which we would go and look on the search bar see okay look for couple related content go on it scroll through it follow a few people as well not too many you don't want to flag the algorithm and then as a part of the phase two of the warm-up what we do is we start putting out these slideshows or not even slideshows single image slideshows with a heavily engaging text overlay on them which is related to the niche. Now what happens when you put

[14:37] this out is this pushes it by then your account is ideally getting honed down on the couple's market as in our case and you put out the slideshow and more couples start reacting to it which helps Tik Tok understand that hey this is your ideal market this is your niche so next time you put out a video they're going to target the same niche why because Tik Tok wants more engagement on their app how they're going to get more engagement as by showing people the kind of content they want to be watching if couples like couple content they're going to show them couple contents which means A plus

[15:06] B matches and this is where a successful warm-up has happened and this is the importance of a warm-up as well. Got it. Yeah. No, that's really helpful especially for someone getting started out and they're kind of new to this. It kind of helps that you broke down like you know exactly what you should be doing like you know looking at the search bar and um also like liking liking the post and commenting on it and stuff. Um I wanted to pivot a little bit to the kind of content we should be putting out as new founders. So, I know there's many different kinds like there's slideshows, there's the talking

[15:38] head ones, and just so many different varieties of things. So, I'd love for you to like chat a little bit about like, you know, obviously what works would be different for the certain type of product that they're building, but just like an overview of like the different kind of content um options that people have. So, I'll tell you about our journey and where we struggled and what we realized

[16:01] along the way. We started with memes because I found them hilarious. I was like, "Ah, This is easy to create content. It's not that hard." You know, you put them out and it's going to be printing views. And I believe that views would equal conversions onto a product. Um, it was a fooly mistake. Like I realized that people watch memes because they want to be entertained. You want them to be going through your content because they have an intention to look

[16:26] for a solution, right? And how that happens is the the first format meme has terrible conversions. Then we shifted over to slideshows because they're a lot easier to create and you can do them by yourself especially with Nano Banana or GPT Mage 2. Um we started plugging through slideshows and they were quite cool except that slideshows do not have that highend engagement in terms of the conversions you can be getting from them. Anywhere you'll manage between 0.2 to 0.4% 4% on a good day. Um then we started seeing how could we actively display our project our product into the content and we looked at reaction and

[17:07] talking heads. So talking heads are brilliant is when you got someone talking to the camera. The advantage is they can be really engaging because someone is actually looking at the user communicating with them talking their problem out loud showing them the solution but they're also really hard to scale. Like it's almost impossible right? Imagine if you're recording a 2minut talking head, the amount of editing you need for one

[17:29] single video. Yeah. And if you try to do this at volume at scale, it becomes really hard. So we realized even the talking heads were giving us good uh conversions, they were a hard to create format. And then we finally stuck somewhere between reaction videos and talking heads. If you have creators online, we do um talking heads a lot. If you don't have creators, we like to use reaction videos a lot in which uh you show someone reacting to the camera with the text overlay on top of the screen and then it pivots to the product being displayed. The advantage is that the product is being shown on camera so it

[18:02] leads to always higher engagement, higher traction plus the fact that Tik Tok or any social likes when there's an emotional element to it. It could be positive emotions. It could also be shock or surprise or anger. Um so reaction was a good classic combination of all of these. Um now what we have come to conclude is that reactions are really good when the product is really vital like you know when the product looks beautiful when it's just like people look at it and it's like hey I

[18:29] want this product. Talking heads are really good when you want to engage with them on a deeper emotional level. Talking heads also work really well for consumer and know for proumer products where a business element is involved because for business it's hard for you to look at someone reacting and be like oh yeah this is right for my business but you look at someone who's explaining it into detail you're like okay this makes a lot more sense right I would like you to try this

[18:50] out. Got it. No that really helps. And yeah I've just started recently like creating like update videos and I understand how hard it is to edit. So I can imagine doing that on a larger scale um with so many different videos. So that really helps to outline everything. Um so so yeah, I wanted to also kind of touch upon like you know if someone is posting a video and they posted like five or 10 videos and um they're not like running

[19:15] like a huge operation, it's just them. Um like what should I be looking at like or what should the person be looking at um to see if it's working? Is it just like I know you mentioned retention and the views. Um like if you're kind of stuck at like I don't know like zero or 200, do you create a new account or like do you like um like wait a few days and then start making content again or what

[19:39] what is the strategy there? Um I'm going to give a very clean framework for this which we utilize right now. The the brackets we put it in is 0 to 200. Usually, you know, either content is completely of the charts bad or the account is flagged or the actions are flagged. 200 to 2,000, you have a hook issue. Your hook is not strong enough to keep them for longer. 2,000 to 10,000, it's the body issue. The body doesn't have strong enough retention to keep them looped in. And over 10,000, just repeat the same format. And as long as you're getting conversion to solve that, you're going to scale and you will

[20:15] have an outlier. and outliers usually you'll get 1 to 5% outlier rate which means outlier is something that breaks beyond the account average and performs at 10x 200x now looking at the different stages right if you're stuck under 200 then what I recommend is put out highly engaging warm-up phase two kind of post which are just text on a single image and you will wonder what kind of text do I put on there just search your niche on the search bar and you will find posts which have like just a very normal image and then they'll have a huge text on them and that will be resonating really

[20:51] well with the audience. It'll get a lot of views. So take the same exact text and put it into your own um image. Put it on top of that. What I recommend is try three to six post in this manner and if all of the posts are getting under 200 then your account is flagged. Ditch that account and start again. If you notice that the posts with this kind of format are getting 500 views and you can maintain an average over six videos or six pieces of content, then the account is healthy and you're just not putting out the right kind of content. First test is for the 200 view mark. Then 200

[21:25] to 2,000. What I recommend doing is experimenting just with the hook. What you want to try and get is at the 3second mark, you want an 80% retention rate. 80% retention on the 3se secondond mark means that you've got the hook dialed in and it'll need a lot of iterations and experimentation. I remember at one point we were putting out these AI clips and we were trying to put the text on top of the the head, top of the chest line, top of the chest and we were like, "Hey, where is it working better?" And we could even notice differences with that. Um, then 2,000 to 10,000 it's a retention issue

[22:01] on the body. What I recommend doing is trying out pattern interrupts. Pattern interrupts are when you try to switch how things are every 3 to 5 seconds. Let's say a pattern interrupt simply could be like I'm on camera with you right now and then I could just come up to your face and tell you hey what's going on Maya and then I could just zoom behind and outline something. So these would be kind of pattern interrupts which forces the user's attention back onto the content. So pattern interrupts work really well to break that retention mold and above 10,000 then you just

[22:28] focus on scaling. Got it. Yeah. No, that's really helpful. I think specifically the every 3 seconds like you know changing it up. I think that's something a lot of people may not know when they're getting started out and they're probably just going to be talking to the camera or something. But I think like um optimizing for like the shorter attention spans. I think it's probably the best move. But um yeah, I wanted to go back to the topic you were talking about or um kind of regarding like the phone forming. I know that's probably a bit advanced, but um I guess like can you explain what that is and

[23:01] kind of like when would be the right stage to get into that and um all that stuff. So I think what what happens to the farmers, right? You've got a single iPhone. Let's say you hypothetically have your own iPhone. You're trying to push out content on that. Cool. Like it makes a lot of sense. And then you

[23:16] notice that you're succeeding, right? You're getting views. You're getting conversions. What you decide to do then is replicate the process across other accounts as well. Now, Tik Tok has a limitation. You will be able to create maximum five accounts on a on a single device for Tik Tok. Ideally, in the three range is where you want to be keeping it. What happens when you hit that marker, but you still want to expand is you have to get a new device in which you can scale in the same manner. So, a phone farm basically is when you have multiple devices lined up 2, three, four, five, 10 in which you've

[23:50] got different accounts set up. And form is a trendy way of saying that you've got multiple accounts with multiple devices and you're managing a lot of them to push out content at scale to Tik Tok. Got it. And do you think it affects the algorithm or anything if it's like you creating the content but it's you on different accounts? Like does it like this might be a very theoretical question but do you think it like kind of um hurts your opportunity if it's like you

[24:16] creating content on multiple accounts? It actually strengthens it in my humble opinion. The reason being because we humans are used to patterns. And when you see a pattern being repeated across a lot of content you're seeing, which means you're seeing the same person coming across a lot of content pieces, you build more trust with the content. As a sample, let's say um I always forget his name. Who's the

[24:42] Spider-Man actor? Oh, Tom Holland. Tom. Tom. So, we've got Tom here. Now, if Tom creates 100 Tik Tok accounts and he's pushing out his face on each of them, you're still going to resonate really well with them because you'll be like, "Ah, that's Tom. That's Tom. That's Tom." You can kind of replicate the same effect on a smaller psychological scale. When you have your own face going out on multiple devices and multiple accounts, people start to attune with it. People are like, "Yeah, I've seen this person before. You know,

[25:08] I've seen this girl before. I know her. I recognize her. I I link up with her." And that actually leads to an increase in your conversions. Got it. No, that's really helpful to know because I think that was one of my concerns. But I guess if you're working across like different products, like for example, if you're marketing a certain product on one phone and then a different accounts like a different product, does that hurt or like is it

[25:31] still okay? It can be a bit harder, but it's not it's not going to hurt you in any way. It might be harder to find that same resonance as you would if you're just pushing out the same product. Um, but it will not harm you. It can only benefit you if you do that. that the struggle doesn't come at doing that. Actually, the struggle comes in one person being able to manage that across across accounts and devices. If you use the same clip and you put that out, it's probably going to get flagged across different accounts if it's the exact same clip because Tik Tok doesn't like

[26:01] duplication of content. So, if it's the exact same clip and you try to post it on 10 accounts, they'll start flagging it on from the second account onwards. Got it. Um, but yeah, I'd like to like kind of end this conversation on something you mentioned in the very beginning. Like you said like you know you guys have done a lot of experiments and you guys have figured out what not to do. So what are some things that people should not do you know absolutely should not do? I think the biggest lesson we learn about absolutely not doing is a lot of people when they think about

[26:31] you know usually what happens in indie hacker's journey is they'll see someone else doing something on Tik Tok and they'll be like yeah that's working for them they're making money it doesn't cost anything to put it out on Tik Tok let me try doing that and I've been through the same phase as well I then you know put out a single piece two pieces 10 pieces of content and of course they're not going to pick up traction because amount of experimentation it takes takes you to get content right, you need to push out at volume heavily time over time to understand what's going to work, what's

[26:59] not going to work. People tend to give up, right? They're like, "Yeah, this is not working. This is not my channel. It's not fitting my product." And they stop there. And that's where I would tell everyone to keep pushing because I can promise you maybe the the first video is going to be crap. The fifth video may be a little bit better. The

[27:16] 10th might be along those same lines. But when you start doing it over and over and over again, you get to learn so much about what works. And suddenly you'll notice, okay, 20th video, you're getting your your first 5,000, 10,000 views. Okay, you hit the 50th video, you're getting your first 100,000 views. And the the benefit of all of this is the more you do it, the better that muscle builds up, which means you get into virality is doesn't take the same amount of time. Like going from 0 to 10,000 is going to take longer than 10,000 to 100,000 and then 10 to 100 is going to take longer than going from 100

[27:50] to 1 million. Got it. Got it. Yeah. No, that's really helpful. And um yeah, no, this whole like episode it's been so like useful because I think for someone getting started out, they're going to learn a lot. And um yeah, no, thank you so much for you know, hopping on the podcast and I'll definitely be linking your X account in case anyone wants to reach out with any additional questions. Um so thank you so

[28:14] much for joining the podcast. No, it was a pleasure, May, and thank you for doing these. These are really cool, right, for a lot of people to learn and pick up stuff and understand what's going on. Uh, so no, thank you for having me there. Sorry for talking that much. I just had a massive cup of coffee before this. I was like

[28:28] caffeinated. I was like, let's go. No, you're helps a lot actually. So, appreciate it. Super cool. No, thank you, M. This is brilliant. Um, anything else you need from my side? Tell me. Awesome. takes.

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